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Steve Jobs Lives (or Is Not Dead, Apparently)

Well, is he in the building or not? Is he all better? Why won't they tell us? And does it matter?

Now, it very well may be that many successful public companies are run by crazy buggers—secretive, paranoid, and contrary to a fantastic degree. It may be that Steve Jobs is actually a breath of fresh air. While he may have tried to hide his health issues, he's certainly open about his peculiarities.

Anyway, he very well could be back at work, and, according to mysterious sources, with a new liver (a hospital in Memphis is now claiming to have supplied it). Indeed, in Jobs' continuing campaign to turn corporate transparency on its ear, various members of the press seem to have been told certain things under certain conditions designed to further cloud the situation. Not just to turn transparency on its ear, but to mock it.

At virtually every step of Jobs' illness there's been a pattern of misinformation and subterfuge and pretense and prevarication. And for what? None of this obfuscation seems to have been to any clear point. There certainly doesn't seem to be a business advantage to this grand deception. The point seems to be just deception itself—how much can Steve Jobs get away with? And even here, it's a little odd because what has been most clear is Jobs' intent to deceive everybody. Perhaps this is what has helped the company avoid the kind of SEC scrutiny that such deception at such a grand scale at a public company would seem to deserve—that is, it's hard to accuse a company of hiding material facts when it's obvious what material facts it's hiding. In other words, it isn't so much an intention to deceive, rather it's just weirdness and eccentricity, and there aren't SEC rules against that.